Remembering Accles & Pollock

Our very own Roving Reporter Dennis revisits the Black Country to find out what's still there and what has changed.

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Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby Dennis » Fri Nov 04, 2011 8:32 pm

(click on photo to enlarge)

I've said it before, “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”… It's certainly true of Accles & Pollock. In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s the steel tube makers A & P, as they were often called, dominated the lives of Oldbury people in a way that it's hard to imagine now. Some of you reading this will either have worked there or had family or friends employed by the company. My father worked there all his life, for 45 years, and I myself had summer jobs in Accles' Purchase Office in 1965 and 1967 which was run by Tom Scholey. A copy of the excellent works magazine, Apollo, which ran from the 1940s to the 1960s, was usually lying around our house, and as soon as I learned to read I used to dip into each new issue. It was a novelty to actually recognize people in a printed text and photographs!

There are a couple of brilliant books published in recent years by the social historian David Kynaston on the post-war years, Austerity Britain 1945-1949 and Family Britain 1950-1956. Apollo magazine could certainly have provided material for a chapter or two of Kynaston's books. As you work your way through the successive issues of Apollo, as I did recently, you can see like a watermark showing through its pages the everyday reality, the values and the hopes of Oldbury workers then. The subject of the journal was ostensibly the making of metal tubes, but this is not the principal interest it holds today, now that the firm exists as part of the Lord Paul's international company Caparo, when most of its buildings have been demolished or are being used for different purposes, and its workforce has been disbanded and, in many cases, died. Austerity Britain and Family Britain, those are indeed the themes that come through so strongly in the 1940s and 1950s issues of Apollo: how hard life really was in the Black Country when peace returned with rationing and shortages of things we now take for granted; then, little by little, things easing up a bit, and a relative return of normality and a modest degree of prosperity for the average factory worker.
Like many of you, I went through all of this, from ration books to colour television, living in the council house of a factory worker, my Dad. Just to prove it, here is a visual aid, this is me at a wedding in 1956, the year of the Suez crisis (I also went to the reception afterwards at the much-missed New Talbot Hotel on Oldbury square):
{simpletext} For some reason I always wore a cap on these social occasions, as children did in that foreign country, the 1950s, even though my school, Titford Road Primary in Langley, actually didn't have a uniform! That's my Mum at the back with the de rigueur half-hat and broad lapelled coat.

I mentioned the values and hopes of that time. These shine through in Apollo magazine. Having been born in the 1940s, I necessarily became a teenager in the 1960s when the young were becoming impatient with the constraints imposed by society through their parents. If these stresses and strains were already being felt in the 1940s and 1950s, very little of that is reflected in the pages of the early Apollos. What is mirrored is a world of conformity and a continuation of the “mustn’t grumble” stoicism of the blackout and blitz, also an laudable earnestness and a kind of honesty and innocence that we seem to have lost. I always think of the world of my childhood (I was born in 1947) as somehow what some historians call “The Long 1930s”, with the continuum being fractured only in the mid-1960s. That's certainly how it feels reading Apollo. Of course the magazine was to some degree the mouthpiece of the company which published it, but even so my memory of the time is that the magazine was not far from the way people generally thought and felt then. Apollo is, unsurprisingly, dominated by the apparently genial figure of the chairman Walter William Hackett senior and his family (sons Walter junior and Leslie Hackett), traveller, raconteur with a literary bent and writer of amusing doggerel verse under the sobriquet of “Khanyer Whackett”. Hardly an issue of Apollo appeared without him featuring somewhere in it - presenting long-service awards, rallying the troops at works meetings, keeping a diary of his musings while visiting New Zealand, even penning verse about world peace at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Walter Hackett senior, who lived in some style in West Bromwich and was closely involved with the board of West Bromwich Albion, left an indelible stamp on Accles & Pollock. He had been involved with A & P from its earliest days, back in the 1900s, and he had a rather revolutionary view of his role in the works, one which modern Human Resources specialists might be surprised by. He'd travelled a lot, particularly in America, and had formed the view that he should be approachable by any member of the workforce, even the humblest employee complaining to him on the factory drive about his pay or conditions. This “hands-on” and strangely democratic philosophy - which was at one time also favoured, I believe, by the Japanese and was not the norm in a huge company like A & P at that time - perhaps held things together through the sometimes bumpy post-war years of Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. After Walter Hackett senior's death on 12 April 1964 things changed and a more familiar “top down” management style was brought in during the later 1960s. Of course employee relations were also changing at that time, in tune with society as a whole and with economic conditions in the world generally – nobody can forget I'm All Right Jack (1959) with Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas the boss and Peter Sellers as the trade union leader Fred Kite.

Accles & Pollock lasted as a recognizable entity from 1901 (when James George Accles received financial backing from Thomas Pollock for his tube-making firm) until probably the 1980s – you can argue that technically it still exists, as a small part of the Caparo conglomerate. In such a vast organization with its many mills and offices on the two sides of Oldbury - the Broadwell site near Oldbury main line railway station (now Sandwell and Dudley) and the Paddock site, over towards Rounds Green and near the Oldbury-Langley branch line - it was hugely to the credit of the company that it made great efforts to cater for the physical and mental well-being of its employees. At the end of World War I, A & P had set up a club for young male employees, first in Talbot Street and later in McKean Road and the Apprentices Society was going strong in the 1960s with organized weekends away at the adventure centre at Nant Cottage in North Wales. I'm sure there is a book waiting to be written about it all. There is an obvious parallel with Cadbury's in Bournville or William Lever in Port Sunlight, except that no model employee village was built – the pre-existing town of Oldbury itself was the employees’ home, and a very smoky one at that!
This is a rather splendid view of Oldbury from Wallace Road, which Jim Rippin has very kindly lent to me, from the late 1940s-early 1950s {simpletext}just look at those chimney stacks!
(Jim's father was a cartoonist for Apollo magazine). It was the Clean Air Act of 1956 which radically affected levels of smoke pollution and sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere and eventually put an end to the smogs we had once known.
{simpletext}
This is another Rippin view of Oldbury from Bury Hill Park, with A & P's Paddock Works,
note ‘Accles & Pollock’ written on the roof.
{simpletext}
In his later colour photo most of that has gone.


At a social and cultural level Accles & Pollock certainly reflected paternalistic capitalism on a (proverbial) good day. The firm existed to make a profit for its shareholders, it would be absurd to deny that, of course, and from long years of observing my father's tribulations and also after working in an office for A & P I’m not naïve to think that the place was perfect. But it often went the extra mile to offer some kind of life outside what could sometimes be hard and dreary work for its office and shopfloor workers. Once a year there was, for example, a Staff Night given by the Board for all staff over 18, from directors to shopfloor, at the TI Ballroom, with a dance, free buffet and free drink and music by the Dave Cadman Orchestra with Maurice Plant, who worked the company, singing! For those under 18 - and therefore not allowed to drink alcohol in those days - there was a Junior Staff Outing to say, Rhyl or Blackpool, with everything similarly free.

At the centre of A & P's extra-curricular activities, as it were, was the remarkable Birchley Sports and Social Club, usually known as the Birchley Pavilion, which occupied a huge area of land off Birchfield Lane, adjacent to the Portway branch of the Titford Canal and the Birchley Rolling Mills. I have no idea how much money it must have cost to acquire the area, some of which at least must have been derelict industrial or mining land. In the middle of it all was a large flat-roofed red-brick clubhouse with a ballroom, smaller rooms leading off, a bar, showers and changing rooms. It was in the modernist style of the 1930s, rather like the Paddock offices on the Oldbury canal, with steps leading up to it at the front and outside staircases up to the flat roof. Behind it was a set of steps up to yet more playing fields on a level with the Portway branch of the Titford Canal, near the Birchley Rolling Mills. It's a matter of regret to me that I never took any photos of the Birchley Pavilion before it was demolished over ten years ago.

The Pavilion still exists in three dimensions in my head. I'm often there in my dreams. I spent so many evenings there while my parents danced and I played with other children in, on and around the building. I remember it with enormous affection. My first vivid memory is of the indescribable stench of the pigsties next to the car park, no doubt a relic of wartime “pig clubs” (remember the film A Private Function?) and the firm doing its bit to supplement meagre rations.
tall fastigiate poplars
The pigsties eventually disappeared, but the drive up to the clubhouse from Birchfield Lane was neat, elegantly lined with tall fastigiate poplars (there are still some of those original poplars at the former sports ground's perimeter on the Wolverhampton New Road even now) and vegetables and flowers were grown. There were extensive greenhouses around there, a house for the caretaker and various other outbuildings. The sports facilities were excellent: tennis courts with a pavilion to change in, a bowling green, a large sunken garden with well kept flowerbeds, a proper sports pavilion for football and cricket with a scoreboard, neatly trimmed hedges separating the different areas, white mobile screens for bad light in cricket, archery butts made out of straw, and no doubt other things I've since forgotten. And acres of football pitches. Just keeping the grass mown half the year must have been a full-time job, not helped by certain children who delighted in playing in the fermenting piles of clippings on summer Saturday evenings! Birchley Pavilion was the venue for meetings, presentations, lectures, darts matches, prize-givings, celebrations of all sorts. I remember my Dad's enthusiasm, for example, about an illustrated talk during the 1950s given by Lt. Col. J. H Williams - known as “Elephant Bill” - who had worked with elephants in Burma during the War. There was a dance every Saturday night and something happening most of the time there. It was particularly good at Christmas and the New Year when the conga line went through various out-of-bounds parts of the building, to general delight… It had its own disc jockey, Harry Hammond who worked in the factory as his day job. Ernie Fidoe was all-round concierge, doorman, head groundsman and factotum at Birchley, his wife used to sell ice cream on a Saturday night at the dances.

Since 1919 Accles had been part of a larger grouping, TI, Tube Investments which included two other Oldbury companies, PEL (of metal and canvas chair fame) and Metal Sections. There was a huge ballroom, the TI ballroom in the Broadwell part of the works – I almost said campus, because the various factories, clubs and sports grounds dominated the town of Oldbury almost in the way, say, that the colleges once dominated Oxford or Cambridge. Apollo magazine covered the other TI companies Pel Ltd and Metal Sections Ltd as well as A & P. Accles & Pollock, both on its own and under the wider aegis of TI, fostered and smiled on a large range of clubs, sporting and otherwise, and what you might call improving indoor pursuits like ballroom dancing, basketball, skittles, darts, snooker and table tennis, both on its own and under the wider aegis of TI. At the top end of the cultural scale was the TI Operatic Society which put on a celebrated performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado at the TI ballroom in 1963. {simpletext} {simpletext}{simpletext}

Part of the adhesive which held the workforce together was the 25-Year Fellowship with its annual dinner for those with 25 or more years of service to the company. There was also the British Legion and the Christian Fellowship. There was even a happy link between some of the sports pursued at Birchley and elsewhere and what the firm actually made. A & P made tubes of many sizes and kinds and for many purposes, of course, from the very small – hypodermic needles and smaller – to the very large - cladding for nuclear reactors in 1972, and the like. It had made the first all-metal aircraft, the Mayfly, in 1910, and the lightweight tubular framework for the ill-fated Bluebird K7 in which Donald Campbell was killed attempting the world water speed record in 1967. Perhaps at the apogee of its success, A & P had produced the world's smallest tube in 1963 (for the artificial insemination of queen bees, if I remember rightly!). But in the general post-war return to prosperity the firm also discovered a market in sporting and leisure goods. It had been making seamless tapered steel golf shafts for golf clubs since 1913, but also made javelins, bows and arrows, billiard cues, 30 different kinds of fishing rod (from trout to shark fishing) and I'm sure other things I've forgotten. There was a sporting goods section at Paddock, I remember Tom Franklin who presided over at least part of it (and with whose daughter I was once hopelessly in love – hé oui, hé oui …) and the remarkable Taperflash seamless tapered steel coarse fishing rod of which I still have one after all these years, now a collector's item. Taperflash, of course, because the tube was “stepped down” by passing it through various ever smaller dies to produce a twelve foot tapered rod. I read somewhere in Apollo that the idea may originally came from the use for angling of wartime metal tank aerials made by A & P and was developed further with great success. There was an informal link between one of its products, the fishing rod, and one of its most popular clubs, A & P Angling Club, reports of whose activities appear regularly in Apollo. Thank to my Dad's friend Tom Franklin, I used to tag along to their fishing matches and fish at empty pegs – at Coven on the South Staffs canal, on the Avon at Evesham, on the Severn at Hampton Loade. The club would also feature honourably in national contests.

Tom Franklin leads me to another society outside the usual football / cricket / tennis / bowls / golf / netball domain – horticulture. A & P had an active gardening club and Birchley supplied bedding plants, tomatoes, geraniums, young vegetable plants, seed potatoes etc. to A & P Horticultural Stores in Union Street, Oldbury where they could be bought for a very modest outlay. Perhaps the club that dominated Apollo magazine for obvious reasons was the Photographic Society. Arundel Castle, photo by Dennis Wood, aged 11
The covers of the magazines were frequently prize-winning entries in the photographic competitions, and many pages were devoted to consolation prizes, runners-up and special awards for summer holiday snaps, including, to pick a page at random, this one, of Arundel Castle! Some of the covers are real works of art, but also pieces of local history like one of the canal between Accles' offices and the Whimsey Bridge in 1956 by Jack Harrold, one of the frequent contributors to the magazine. In 1956 the canal was clearly still earning its keep, there are at least a dozen vessels in that view. Not much happens there now, although it is a tribute to British Waterways that the canal is now clean enough to attract coarse fishermen!

But there was even more than that. There was also classical music appreciation - the Recorded Music Section (as some groups were called) run by Frank Tranter in the Old Canteen Lounge in Rounds Green. (The New Canteen was of course much bigger and on the opposite bank of the canal from Paddock offices). We're talking about the early 1960s, so it was nothing terribly sophisticated: an introduction by Frank to, say, Beethoven's Fifth and then a recording of it played on a gramophone to an audience of Accles employees sitting in a room. I went along on at least a couple of occasions with my father - Frank Tranter's brother Sam was our next door neighbour, a corporation dustman who had come to love classical music himself, as many had during the War years.

The directors of Accles were always keen to improve the knowledge and practice of its promising junior management. Induction courses were introduced for those entering industry from school, and training was on offer for those higher up, at supervisor level. My Dad began in the offices, then in the 1950s and 1960s was in charge of various mills at Broadwell. When he retired in the late 1970s he had returned to the Planning Office at Paddock. Like others of his peers, he was sent on training courses by Accles (he’d left Oldbury Technical School aged 14) – to Ashridge College in Berkshire, to Aston University and, most memorably, to Düsseldorf for two weeks in 1959 to observe German industry in the Ruhrgebiet recovering after the War. Bernard Wood on the right, on a trip to Germany 1959Like most people then, he’d never been abroad before and it made a huge impression on him. He came back with inspiring books about bridge and Autobahn building in North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, and Wiederaufbau generally – that is, rebuilding – which in turn impressed me at the age of 12! Apollo duly interviewed him on his return and published a report on his findings. {simpletext}
{simpletext}
In a curious way the company at its height was like a self-sufficient town, rather as an ocean liner is. There were nurses and medical facilities. I sprained my foot while working there and was treated by Tom Flint, the very helpful resident blind Australian physiotherapist. There were firemen, carpenters, drivers, cooks, postmen and so on. There was an efficient internal postal service with brown re-usable envelopes - I remember a delightful Yorkshireman named Harold who would deliver the post to the office and leave with a cheerful “hasta la vista”. Then, of course, there were the many departments of the company itself, mills, offices, laboratories and so on. The mills – to a child and indeed a teenager – were a bit overwhelming on my occasional visits, with their powerful smells, not just swarf and machine oil but trichloethylene, industrial soap and other rather menacing substances in the boshes or vats associated with tube production. I tried the other day to find any remnants of the Broadwell site, part of which is occupied by Metsec plc, the successor to Metal Sections. There are one or two isolated redbrick buildings of the right vintage, somewhere in the area of the old TI Ballroom, one of them now bricked up.

And in the midst of this there was an intense camaraderie, however hard the work or hours, and of course socializing in the pubs of Oldbury and beyond.  Prize Wiining Photo by Jack Harold The firm fostered loyalty and a sense of belonging with a Bright Ideas Committee which awarded money for just that - bright ideas. Above all there was the hallowed ritual of the presentation of a 25-years inscribed gold watch, the 50-year gold badge and the rite of farewell at retirement with, for example, the traditional carriage clock or, later, a portable radio. This was, of course, in no way unique to Accles & Pollock, but it was all emphasized by Apollo, which itself was an important part of holding onto the workforce’s hearts and minds. The subtext was: “This is a good firm to work for, we’re like a big family, stay with us”. That was the glue that held things together for so long. Even marriages and obituaries were faithfully recorded in Apollo, giving reinforcing the sense of “from cradle to grave”.

Sometimes Accles people went to other places – a visit to Europe, America or the USSR, and sometimes a rapidly changing world descended on A & P and Apollo reported it. By May 1964 The Beatles were already at the top of the charts, but that old stager, singer Frankie Vaughan, who was in pantomime, came to the Main Offices at Paddock and was enthusiastically greeted. He never lost his appeal to young women, something, I confess, I always found inexplicable, rather like his (to a teenager) bizarre top hat and cane routine. He was just one of many famous visitors faithfully logged by Apollo magazine. Others were, for example Field Marshal Montgomery and Bela Lugosi, the actor who famously played Dracula: I’m told he was photographed holding a hypodermic needle menacingly close to the arm of a secretary!

From the perspective of 2011 the firm was probably ahead of its time in some ways, “warts and all”. I say “warts and all” because my Dad had some pretty unpleasant bosses at times and some very hard experiences there, but I’m pretty sure he was proud of having worked at Accles. It was his life. It’s impossible to see the past entirely accurately, or indeed as the past once saw itself, but when you look at all those photographs of children’s Christmas parties so faithfully recorded in Apollo or of New Year gatherings for employees, it’s difficult not to feel a twinge of nostalgia for a world - and for an Oldbury - that is now irrevocably lost. As I said at the beginning, “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”… Woods at TI Christmas 1961

And I can’t remember, finally, what the rather solemn and bookish youth on the right was thinking about it all at Christmas 1961 but the main thing was that everybody else appears to be having a good time!

© Dennis Wood 2011
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby Northern Lass » Sat Nov 05, 2011 2:00 pm

Another great trip down the BC Memory Lane
thanks to Dennis, you make the area come alive for us that don't know
it that well and were just a twinkle in someone's eye in the 1950's :wink:

My gran worked at Cadburys and she used to talk about
the way they all looked after each other and that sort of "big family" feel.
I wish I had listened more rather than wondering what chocs she had for me that weekend
:oops:

Keep em coming coz den xx
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby BC Wench » Sun Nov 06, 2011 12:48 pm

Wonderful Dennis. Many a happy hour have I spent being a scorer in that cricket score box alongside the other players girlfriends.
Researching: PARGETER, BELCHER, BRADLEY, DANDO, ROWLEY, ROWSELL
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby Rob » Sun Nov 06, 2011 1:41 pm

Dennis you never fail to deliver.Brings back all the memories and tribulations of growing up in 1950's Oldbury.Indeed when looking back it always seems a completely different world compared to now.
When i was a lad of 17years i worked at Accles and Pollock Hypo department "Doggin' up" for 7 months.The only reason i applied for a job was to play for Accles's Colts which i did for 3 years.Our club house was the Apollo Boy's Club Mckean Road where we would assemble for our away games.Eating a pre match meal usually poached eggs on toast before we'd be transported in a mini bus to our venue. We were always well looked after by Arthur Bywater and his wife Mim,who ran the Apollo.Arthur was also manager of the Colts.
Home games would be played at Birchley where we would normally play on the pitch by the cricket pavilion.The pitch by the club house was where the first team,and they were good in those days 65-67,played their matches.
Thursday nights would be spent in the social club where Harry Hammond would spin his records and although i only worked for Accles for 7 months i managed to use my old personel number for another 3 years.
I grew up in Eel Street close to Accles and one of my earliest memories is the hooter going off every day when workers came home for their dinners.
A few of my uncles also worked at Accles and one of them was member of the Archery Club and he took me along once or twice but i never fancied it.I hurt my arm the first time i tried to use his bow and the pain put me off ever trying again.
Worcestershire Count Cricket played their a few times as well.I still have the autographs of Don Kenyon,Peter Richardson and Jack Flavell among others.Well i do still have the autograph book but i should have used a pen instead of pencil!!
Anyway thanks Dennis for reviving memories.
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby mallosa » Sun Nov 06, 2011 2:52 pm

Would it be possible I wonder, to compile a list of those we know that worked at Accles and between what years?

Perhaps some of our members would like to help? :grin:
If you would like to have your ancestors photo's included in our Gallery, please send me a pm.

Researching: Evans, Rollason, Henley/Hendley, Brookes, Taylor (Wilson - Birmingham)
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby Dennis » Sun Nov 06, 2011 5:21 pm

Thank you all for your kind words! "Dogging up down Accles" was what my Dad said I could always do if school homework lost its appeal, Rob - and there were times when I was sorely tempted... :-) I know what the job involved from occasional visits to the mills. My Dad's friend George Cox lived in Eel Street, a very nice chap with a moustache. Nothing left now of those terraced houses. For some reason the works hooter was always called "the bull" by my mother. It was part of life then, like the blasting at the Rowley quarry. Or summer evenings at Birchley, which was as close to Heaven as it got...
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby Rob » Sun Nov 06, 2011 8:04 pm

It was "The Bull" i remember now.My paternal Grandparents lived in Windsor Road just down the road from the quarries and you could set your clock by the explosions.Church bells from St Giles's on a sunday morning listening to Billy Cotton .Sorry i'm going off topic here.
I did end up doing something better than "doggin'up" :lol: and thats not being derisive.It learnt me to appreciate everything that comes along in later life and the people i worked with were brilliant.My mom will know George Cox.The names familiar i think he lived in "Little" Eel Street.
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby Annie » Sun Nov 06, 2011 8:10 pm

Really enjoyable reading Dennis brings the places alive for me never having visited the Black Country , and the pictures are the icing on the cake for me who can only imagine what the different places look like, so thank you Dennis. :-)

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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby Dennis » Mon Nov 07, 2011 7:33 am

Don't get me started on radio programmes, Rob! :lol: Sunday lunchtimes and early afternoons were the land of Educating Archie, The Navy Lark, The Billy Cotton Band Show, Forces Favourites, and Movie-Go-Round. I used to sit alone in the front room with my homework and the radio as background. As a child you tend not to question the absurdity of things like a radio programme about a ventriloquist's dummy (Archie) or the incredible "squareness" of the Billy Cotton show which was pure 1940s. I lapped it all up...
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby cakemorebloke » Tue Jul 03, 2012 8:09 am

my dad worked at an p and was in the angling club
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby Rob » Tue Jul 03, 2012 9:13 pm

How's things Cakemorebloke? Long time no hear.I've sent you a pm.
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby Dennis » Tue Jul 10, 2012 12:34 pm

I used to tag along with the Angling Club with my Dad, they'd let me fish at vacant pegs. I remember Hampton Ferry, the Coven canal, Hampton Loade, the Soar near Loughbrough. Some of the club members caught enormous numbers of fish, I loved watching the weigh-ins, no idea to this day how they managed it... Tom Franklin was in charge of making Taperflash rods in the early 1960s. A lost world...
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby cakemorebloke » Wed Jul 25, 2012 8:18 am

im fine rob mate hows ye i m vistting patty today getting some old family stuff ilpass on my regards mate
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby Tom Waterhouse » Mon Aug 27, 2012 3:55 pm

Dennis- Wonderful article- I have just registered and was an Indentured Production Engineering Apprentice at Accles and Pollock from 1953 and qualified in Mechanical and Production Engineering ; like your father I was the Mill and Cold Reducing Mill Manager in the Stainless Division in Broadwell Road which later came under the umbrella of T I Stainless Tubes Ltd- I have noticed one of the photographs on your page wich shoes my mentor Allan Deacy, and his wife Betty , Howard Buxton and Harry Slater- happy days; I have so many happy memories from 1953 until I left in 1971 as I could not settle when we moved from Broadwell to Green Lane , Walsall and it was never the same- I captained Accles cricket team for many years before moving to Himley Cricket Club where I was also captain and I am still invoved and wih the County and the Premier League during my time at Paddock I time seved in the Stockyard, Central Planning Office, All the tube Mills , Test House and Laboratory the Drawing Office and the boss was George Bayliss who is als on the picture I have referred to; I could go on and on and if anyone who reads this remembers me do post input
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Re: Remembering Accles & Pollock

Postby Rob » Mon Aug 27, 2012 9:38 pm

Welcome Tom Waterhouse another one of Accles' sporting celebrities!!
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